While the Mir Display Server and the Wayland protocol are widely viewed as the next-generation display technologies for Linux systems, there's already been delays with Mir and Wayland hasn't yet been widely adopted. Even if/when Mir and Wayland manage to lift off, the X.Org Server won't suddenly die and will be supported for years to come.

The X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) 2013 conference took place at the start of the week in Portland, Oregon. As usual, there's a number of Phoronix articles to go over in detail the many interesting presentations that took place this week concerning the X.Org Server, Mesa / Gallium3D graphics drivers, Mir, Wayland, and related Linux graphics initiatives.

While most developers are focused around new innovations for Wayland (or Mir), there's still life ahead for the X.Org Server in maintaining legacy support and other cases where the xorg-server will not die for years to come. In improving the X.Org Server, Adam Jackson at Red Hat has been working on rewriting the GLX portion of the X.Org Server.

While X.Org Server 1.15 was planned for release in September with the usual release cadence for X.Org updates, this isn't going to happen. X.Org Server 1.15 is going to be delayed until there's more interesting code merged.

The experimental DRM render nodes support will be merged into the Linux 3.12 kernel. This work is a GSoC success story and makes it possible for Linux GPGPU compute support without needing an active display/compositor and ultimately for having multi-seat computing off a single display controller and another benefit is efficient compositor stacking.

The XPRA project provides a means of having "persistent remote application" support for X11 applications atop an X.Org Server. This allows for X applications to live on even if the connection to the server has been dropped.

While there's an X.Org 7.8 Wiki page that mentions planned features like XWayland integration and video driver hot-plugging, there isn't active work towards putting out the X.Org 7.8 katamari nor specifically on delivering these mentioned features.

Back-ends have been implemented for VDPAU to implement the video hardware-based decoding process over OpenGL and through Intel's VA-API interface, for those not using the NVIDIA binary blob or the VDPAU Gallium3D state tracker.

While Mir and Wayland are the future of Linux desktop display serving, X11 isn't going to magically disappear in the near-term. X.Org Server releases will keep coming for maintaining support for existing X11 clients, other alternative operating systems and environments where Wayland/Mir don't work, etc. With the X.Org Server still having a future, Keith Packard has been working on some improvements.

Canonical last week posted 15 patches so Mesa could support their Mir Display Server and specifically the Mir EGL platform. Those patches haven't received many comments from upstream Mesa developers, but there were more than 200 comments in our forums. Over the night, Canonical has posted X.Org Server patches for supporting XMir plus the open-source driver patches so it can handle XMir with nested compositing.

David Herrmann has a GSoC project for working on DRM render and mode-set nodes and so far he has been making great progress. On Sunday he posted his second revision of his unified VMA offset manager patch-set and DRM render node work.

MicroXwin is an X.Org Server alternative for an X Windows System implementation for Unix/Linux desktop. The developers behind MicroXwin are claiming that by implementing their X Server in the kernel they are getting a 2x performance advantage while using less memory and being binary compatible with Xlib.

A pleasant and welcome change since this year's X.Org Foundation election is the return of meeting summaries for providing board members and the stakeholding desktop community with the results of each bi-weekly meeting.

The security researcher that uncovered a host of X.Org security issues went beyond just evaluating the X.Org libraries and looked at other Linux desktop packages too. There's many security-related bugs outstanding within the Linux desktop ecosystem and Ilja van Sprundel believes "things could be better by several orders of magnitude."

It was just last month that there was an X.Org Server security issue dealing with hot-plugging of input devices. Being announced today is a new round of security problems, this time multiple issues dealing with X.Org client libraries.

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